potatoes

We’ve got an odd assortment of things in the gastronomic kitchen right now, and so for dinner tonight we had two very good, though oddly paired, dishes: a tomato salad and roasted root vegetables.

Yesterday morning we disovered, to our dismay, that our tomato plants have the dreaded blight. They grew so well (7 feet tall!!), but will not be yielding any edible fruit. So when we went to the farmers market with our friends Caly and Steve later in the day we were on the hunt for some non-blighted tomatoes.

Most of the time we try to keep this blog focused on moderately healthy meals. This is an exception. There’s really nothing healthy about this, but after a pretty hectic couple of weeks for the both of us, it hit the spot.

We’ve tried lots of baked & stovetop macaroni & cheese recipes in the past, but all of them seemed to be mising something. So I started from an Alton Brown recipe, dialed up the seasoning and added paprika and chiles, and wound up with a winner, if I do say so myself.

I totally forget the recipe for this one. Judging by the picture it was diced tomato, white beans, potato, celery, onion, carrot, salt & pepper, and maybe spinach. I wouldn’t have put it up at all but I just liked the picture. Experiment on your own!

We had been calling this recipe “potato soup” until after our first bites, when Gastronomike commented that it tasted like a vegetarian clam chowder. And so the soup gained a new name, at least for me. We both really enjoyed this, and it was a great meal to have on an unseasonably chilly August evening. The only thing missing was a loaf of crusty bread to accompany the chowder.

While we do a pretty good job faking our way around the kitchen, when it comes to the grill, R. & I are ridiculously inept. But the only way to get better is to practice, right? Tonight, with the beginning of classes right around the corner, we gave it the old college try and wound up with our third straight meal that garnered enthusiastic thumbs-up from the both of us. (more…)